Let me preface this by saying I love new bards.
I screamed myself hoarse for bards to get some actual love, to give them some proper ASF, expand their spellbook and give them synergy, and the whole song rework, the curses, the class scalings and everything that happened to the class is just amazing.
However, there are some things that are still less than perfect. Some of the points I'm going to make are of less severity than others, obviously. Also keep in mind that this is in contemplation of majority bard levels builds and not dip builds.
Lich Lyrics:
This curse damages friendlies, this is how it works in vanilla, but it probably should be reviewed to be party friendly.
Curse Song Removal:
However strong the curse song may be, removing all effects with a lesser restoration (which may be drunk immediately from common and inexpensive potions) makes dealing with them somewhat trivial. Since there's no visual effect or /way/ to know if a PC/NPC has been affected by a curse song, it also makes them uncertain for the bard whether they should try to reapply it.
Curse song effects should not be removable with a Lesser Restoration and should be upgraded to Normal/Greater resto. Restoration is accessible from wands for characters with UMD and from mundane Pies of Restoration.
Additionally, a visual effect would be appreciated.
Curse Song Effect:
Further, why is the Song a persistent Aura, but the Curse a one-time application effect? The inconsistency makes grasping the mechanics of how the songs are meant to work harder than it should (and if you've seen the new bard wiki, you know there's a LOT of new mechanics with little nuances, duration, radius, effects).
As a matter of consistency, the Curse should be a persistent, undispellable aura debuff (and if you want to dispell it, kill the bard).
Curse Damage:
Currently, a character that is afflicted by a curse cannot be damaged with the damage component of a curse.
This should not be the case, a character should be damaged on every re-application of a Curse.
Learning Songs:
Learning songs in the world is great and teaching them is fantastic, but if I learn it from another player I'd like to be PROMPTED if I want to learn it, instead of it being added directly to my known songs just because I was caught in the area of effect.
Song Quality:
Some songs are definitely better than others.
Some look not so great when you consider them, like the Frostbound Range and the Blacksmith Ballad, until you realize greatly neutralize ice/fire based damage, which in some thematic dungeons you get absolutely spammed with. These are great.
Then there are some Songs that are subjective useful in one specific scenario, and that's alright - like the Draconic Dirge when you have to go against a dragon boss, the Purser's Piece for selling, or the Miner's Melody for that sweet mining RNG.
Then there are a few that could a little more oomph to be worth using.
The Sentinel Song, the Masking Melody, the Deceptive Ditty, and the Ranger's Round are a little on the subpar side. I'll go into detail for each of these:
(Assuming you have ESF: Perform, which you should if you are a main bard)
Sentinel gives you See Invisibility and Ultravision. Given these are 2 low level spells that anybody can have wanded or potioned they aren't great, though you can make a case to use it in desperation if you get hit with an unexpected Darkness, which can wreck you in both PvE and PvP. Still, the DR scaling is mediocre (and as usual, there's no way to know if this stacks with other DR sources, which needs to be clarified) and should definitely be a little more generous. The Spot/Listen is fine, but since you can't benefit from your own Listen from Noisy Mechanics that's worth half as much to yourself.
Masking Melody gives you Perform/Bluff scaling, and up to +6 mind saves (for pure bards).
And that's it. No effects. The mind saves are neat but it should definitely do a little more. I'd suggest giving a one-use Clarity or a Slippery Mind effect.
The Deceptive Ditty has an interesting array of skills, but ultimately the only reason I'd end up using it is to make use of Shadow Doors for party benefits. This is /great/ but I wish this was also a viable combat song, since otherwise the Concealment scales 1% per effective song level, which is not great, capping at 30%. If this had a more generous Concealment capping at 40/45% this would a vastly better song.
Ranger's Round: This is a song that doesn't get anything noticeable. You get some movement speed that only works in Wilderness, but it's less than what you'd get from the Traveler's Tune, which works everywhere. And it gets AB/AC vs Animals and Magical Creatures, which is genuinely a rare enemy group in PvE and practically useless entirely in PvP. This is the one song I don't see any place to use other than to help the ranger/druid in my party when they need some oomph for their Animal Empathy (which is never).
Selfish Solo:
This song is unique in all regards that it gives a bunch of good effects, but it only applies them to the bard.
The best one, however, is the +1 APR - which you only get on 2 circumstances: Pure bard, or 10 Dirgesinger+Epic Assassin.
I would be infinitely happier if this gave you +1 APR for any 3 APR build, which is the same as saying any <16 pre epic BAB build, or any <21 BAB. Any 3 APR melee build is painful to play, and sometimes downright useless in PvP against anybody that knows what they are doing. If you are singing this song to boost your APR to 4, you are pretty much forsaking your party role as a bard, or everybody friendly around you is dead.
Bard Bonus Feat:
Bards get an extra feat at lvl 10. This is great. Bards are already feat starved for the most part. I'd love to get another at lvl 20.
Their feat selection is a little tiny. This is not great. The selection could also include spell foci and regular combat feats.
Unremitting Cadence I/II:
These 2 feats give you auto-extend on spells 1/3 and 4/6.
Bards are pretty feat starved if you are doing a combat build rather than going full support.
And going 21 charisma is not going to happen for literally any other than a main caster bard. These feats are not super great and they have a pretty hefty requirement to begin with. I would suggest to remove the cha requirement entirely, and even then I'm not sure it's worth sinking 2 feats for autoextend.
Song of the Heart:
This is an OK feat, but again this is completely unattainable for any but main cha builds. Which I'm sure it's intentional, but I also fail the logic when you are already paying a hefty feat tax to get here. The way it stands it asks for epic bard levels, 25 charisma, Unremitting Cadence II, AND Epic Reputation. This is a huge bruh feat.
I feel this should be a lot more lax on its requirements, even asking Epic Reputation alone seems too much.
Song/Curse Stacking:
This is the meat of the thread and the main reason for why I'm writing this.
Currently, it is functionally useless to have more than 1 bard in the party, as you only get the bonus from the best one singing.
This sucks.
I cannot put to words how much it sucks that your main party benefit is completely rendered redundant by having another bard with you, and instead of singing together or empowering one another you get nothing. This is the same for curses and dirgesingers too.
Mind I am not saying that songs should fully stack to hit the +20 dodge AC cap either.
The way this should work is by having bards sing different songs, and each of them apply the unique scaling of each different song, while still using the main Rhythm scaling from the best bard.
This means you should be allowed to have a party with - say - 3 bards at levels, 29, 26, 20, and each of them could be singing a Healing Hymn, A Traveler's Tune and a Slime's Serenade to get the Regen-Healing-Acid resist of each effect and benefit from the Rhythm of the lvl 29 bard. This is not even as powerful as it sounds, as each of those characters is a /dedicated/ bard to get most of those effects to some degree that are actually useful, they are support caster/fighters for the most part. They won't be doing WM damage or exploding mob spawns like a spellsword party.
The same should be the case with Curses - currently, again, if you have a bard and a dirgesinger in the party, only one of those curses are going to stick, and the other character has to forfeit to use one of their main class tools. Different curses should stack the same as Songs.
I'd go as far as to suggest that bards singing the same songs should increase the potency by one dynamic tier for each singing bard, up to the cap of 30, but I am not married to this suggestion and there are better hills to die on.
That is all I can muster at the moment after playing an epic bard with other bards for the last 2 months or so. If I think of anything else that's been going around my head I'll add it as an Edit before this segment.
And I want to conclude by reminding everybody that feedback and criticism is never an insult or a personal slight on the people that worked and designed the class. I just want to bring what issues it currently has to the light in the hopes that we may have a greater playing experience. And I also want 4 APR. Please give me 4 APR I'm begging you I will give you hea-....
